By Keegan Gibson, Contributing Writer and Brittany Foster, Managing Editor

– A Pennsylvania judge struck down the state’s Voter ID requirement Friday, citing its inherent threat to the rights of legitimate voters as well as problems with the law’s implementation.

In his ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley said the law was unconstitutional.

“[The Voter ID Law is] invalid and unconstitutional on its face as the provision and issuance of compliant identification does not comport with liberal access and unreasonably burdens the right to vote,” he wrote.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal.”

McGinley said the state’s efforts to make it easier for voters to obtain ID – or to mitigate any problems by using provisional ballots – are insufficient.

“The right to vote, fundamental in Pennsylvania, is irreplacable, necesitating its protection before any deprivation occurs. Deprivation of the franchise is neither compensable nor reparable by after-the-fact legal remedies, necessitating injunctive and declaratory relief.”

It is unclear whether the Commonwealth will appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s office defended the law; PoliticsPA is seeking comment from her office.

PoliticsPA is also seeking comment from Governor Tom Corbett, who supported the requirement and signed it into law.

The state legislature passed the Voter ID law in spring 2012. It required that all voters furnish photo identification at the polls, including but not limited to a drivers licenses, passport, military ID, certain students ID and certain nursing home IDs.

Supporters of the law said it was necessary to prevent voter fraud. Opponents said it was a partisan effort to suppress the votes of minorities, the elderly and students who disproportionately lack ID and are more likely to support Democrats.

The voter ID requirement was never in effect during an election due to ongoing injunctions from the courts.

In their legal challenge to the law, opponents said the burden of proof was on supporters to prove that in-person voter fraud was a serious threat. Judge McGinley agreed, and he said they had failed.

“Certainly a vague concern about voter fraud does not rise to a level that justifies the burdens constructed here,” McGinley wrote.

Source: http://www.politicspa.com/breaking-pa-judge-strikes-down-voter-id/54310/

By Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools

– Philadelphia public schools achieve DESPITE the governor! We did it ourselves, no thanks to Gov. Tom Corbett!

Gov. Tom Corbett’s draconian cuts to public education have robbed our children of vital programs and services. As a result of unprecedented state education budget cuts, students have had to do without sufficient number of nurses, counselors, school aides, librarians, teachers, supplies, and activities.

Now Governor Corbett is coming to Philly to highlight the successes of high-achieving schools. But Corbett did nothing but make it harder for schools to successfully educate children. Schools like Central do well despite the governor and his brutal cuts. We did it without you!

Join us this Friday, January 17, to highlight the achievements our city’s schools made without help from the governor. And tell Gov. Corbett he can only take credit for HURTING our schools! Join parents, students, and activists to protest the governor and his cuts that have damaged our public schools!

Don’t let Governor Corbett take credit for the hard work of Philadelphia’s educators and students! We did it without you, governor!

(At 9:45am we will gather at N. Broad St and Olney Ave and then March to Central High School 1700 W. Olney Ave where the rally will take place.)

DETAILS:

– When – Friday January 17, 2014 at 9:45AM

– Location and Schedule:

– 9:45AM – Crowd will Meet at Broad St. & Olney Ave.

– 10AM – March From Broad and Olnet to Central H.S. at 1700 W. Olney Ave.

– 10:30AM – Rally in Front of Onley H.S.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/events/1394897340764754/?source=1

Dear Representative,

I am writing to respectfully urge you to vote “NO” on House Bill 1507 and Senate Bill 1034, the so-called “paycheck protection” legislation.

This legislation has nothing to do with protecting anyone’s paycheck or their rights in the workplace. This is simply the latest attack on collective bargaining rights funded by wealthy, anonymous interests from out of state who will go to great lengths to destroy unions in America.

These interests, which refuse to disclose the sources of their financing, are making misleading arguments to attack bargaining rights that have virtually no basis in reality. Their goal is to starve unions of resources and force them to spend their time and energy collecting dues payments instead of representing workers.

Payroll deductions and “fair share” fees are not forced. They are deductions that are bargained between the employer and the union and must be contractually approved by both. The General Assembly should continue to allow these issues to be resolved through the collective bargaining process and not by legislative fiat.

Anti-worker interests are trying to spread a misleading theme that public employees are somehow forced to join a union against their will and make political contributions to candidates with whom they disagree. No public employee in Pennsylvania is forced to join a union. However, unions are required by law to represent each employee of the bargaining unit regardless of his or her membership in the union. Fair share fees are a reasonable way for unions to recover the actual cost of representing workers who choose not to join the union and pay dues, and these fees can only be used for activities such as negotiating and enforcing a contract, legal representation for grievances, and governance activities. These fees do not fund political activities, which are exclusively funded by voluntary contributions.

The argument that employers should not be using their administrative resources to deduct union dues and fees is ridiculous. Payroll systems are highly automated and already equipped to process various deductions for a wide variety of purposes, including contributions to charities. There is virtually no cost for using existing payroll technology to process these deductions. Instead, this legislation is simply a misleading effort to distract the public and attack the ability of unions to vigorously represent the members of their bargaining units.

I find it particularly sickening that the entities pushing this legislation refuse to disclose the sources of their contributions. In contrast, labor unions engaged in political activity publicly disclose all of their expenditures, as well as the sources of their contributions—hard working, tax-paying Pennsylvania voters!

These bills pose a direct threat to collective bargaining rights of ALL employees—both public and private sector. Pennsylvania’s labor unions helped to create the high quality standard of living all workers in our great commonwealth enjoy. This legislation will not create a single job, nor will it do anything to improve the quality of life for our fellow citizens.

As you know, I have made my opinion known to you previously on many important legislative issues. Though we may not agree on every issue, I never send you a letter that is not factual or critical to the future of my industry. I wouldn’t take up your valuable time if I did not think House Bill 1507 and Senate Bill 1034 were reckless, damaging, and unnecessary pieces of legislation. What makes Pennsylvania great is its workers—protect them and their rights by voting “NO” on these terrible bills.

Thank you for your consideration

By Amanda Becker and Carlyn Kolker

(Reuters) – When the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in a case involving soda bottler Noel Canning Corp., presidential appointment power will be the main dispute, but the case will also put on display one of Washington’s most politically polarizing agencies – the National Labor Relations Board.

Created nearly 80 years ago to supervise union elections and protect workers’ rights to organize, the NLRB is a battleground for pro-labor Democrats and pro-management Republicans.

Deep disagreement between the two sides over the NLRB’s role – and over organized labor itself – makes disputes involving the board uncommonly bitter and subjects its agenda to constant reshaping, depending on which party controls the White House.

“It’s no accident … that this major constitutional showdown is occurring over appointments to the board,” said AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker, a former board member.

Monday’s case began as a labor dispute. The NLRB found in February 2012 that Noel Canning, a Pepsi bottler in Yakima, Washington, had reneged on a verbal contract during union negotiations. The company appealed to the courts, attracting the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, conservative interest groups and Republican leaders in Congress. The case evolved into a constitutional challenge to the president’s power to make appointments to key posts without Senate confirmation.

At issue are “recess appointments” made in January 2012 by Democratic President Barack Obama to the NLRB. Two of these appointees presided over the board’s Noel Canning deliberations, which the company and its supporters are contending was invalid.

An NLRB spokesman declined to discuss the case.

WOBBLY ENFORCEMENT

Since its Great Depression origins, discord over the NLRB and the labor law it enforces have led to policy flip-flops and vacillating oversight as political power shifts in Washington.

One measure of this is agency data on how often the board seeks court injunctions. In cases where it suspects a labor law violation, the five-member NLRB board can authorize seeking a court order, or injunction, telling an employer to halt a questionable practice while a case moves forward.

Agency data for 1976-2011 show that when Democrats are in the White House, injunction authorizations rise, but when Republicans take over, authorizations decline, reflecting deep differences between the two parties about to what extent the board should intervene in labor disputes.

Another indicator is sometimes startling flip-flops on labor law issues, experts said. Unlike courts, the NLRB is not bound by its prior case precedent and can alter past positions.

For instance, the board has reversed course on whether graduate students at private universities can join labor unions. In 2000, under Democratic President Bill Clinton, the NLRB said New York University graduate students could unionize.

In 2004, under Republican President George W. Bush, the board reversed that decision. Then under Obama, it said in 2012 that it would reconsider the Bush-era determination, though the union withdrew its case in a deal with the university.

“It’s not good for the constituency the NLRB serves – whether it’s employees, employers or unions – to have rules always in flux,” said Marshall Babson, an NLRB member during the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan.

‘G– D— LABOR BOARD’

“This agency has been controversial from Day One,” said former NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman in an interview.

An October 1938 article in Fortune, a business magazine, was headlined, “The G– D— Labor Board,” and called the law it was supposed to enforce a “patently one-sided” pro-union statute that was the most “bitterly contested” of all Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.

A Republican-backed effort led to management-friendly amendments to the law in 1947. Liebman said modern-day board members still debate whether the agency’s primary mission is enforcing the original statute or the amendments.

“That’s one of the things that has created the flip flopping, the dissenting opinions, so much controversy,” Liebman said. “It’s a statute that was never fully accepted.”

QUORUM CALL

The five-member board, picked by the president and subject to U.S. Senate confirmation, decides hundreds of cases each year. Three members are needed to decide a case. Members’ five-year terms are staggered, with one expiring each year. Some board vacancies have gone unfilled in recent years.

Before Obama installed the recess appointees contested by Noel Canning, the board had only two members and could not take official action. If the soda bottler prevails, the practical fallout for the NLRB will be limited. The Senate cut a deal in July that led to the confirmation of five NLRB members, marking the first time in a decade the board had all its seats filled.

If Noel Canning wins, those members will likely have to re-decide more than 100 cases pending before U.S. appeals courts that challenge decisions made in part by recess appointees, Liebman said.

But the larger question is whether the case could hobble efforts by Obama – and future presidents – to overcome political gridlock and fill key posts across the government.

One NLRB member’s term expires in December. So the turbulent agency’s next vacancy – and another potential confirmation fight – is less than a year away.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/12/us-usa-court-nlrb-idUSBREA0B06T20140112

BY Stephen Franklin

– Back in organized labor’s heyday, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1010, in Hammond, Ind., decided to fight for pensions. It wasn’t a foolish notion. Some American workers had pensions, and new U.S. labor laws and rulings had led the way to bargaining for them.

But there were companies that balked at the idea, and Inland Steel, which employed Local 1010 members, was one of them. So the steelworkers went on strike on Oct. 1, 1949. A month later, the strike was over, the local had a pension plan, and American workers gained a foothold on a ladder that they kept on climbing.

By 1980, pension plans covered nearly 36 million private-sector workers. Not all of these were union members. Once unions had pioneered pensions, non-union employers began offering these retirement plans as well.

For years, many pensions were of the “defined-benefit” variety, where employers set aside funds that were to be paid out to workers upon retirement. Workers put their faith and futures into these pensions, which were seen as an unbreakable promise that a lifetime’s work in even the dirtiest job would guarantee them senior years in comfort.

That began to change in the 1980s, as the collapse of unions, financial crises, business failures and new accounting rules slashed away at these pensions. “Defined-contribution” pensions like 401(k)s were introduced, which shifted the financial burden and investment decisions to workers. They also lost the certainty that once came with traditional pensions. The transition has not gone well for some workers financially and emotionally.

By 2011, 31 percent of private-sector workers at in the U.S. had this new type of pension, while only 3 percent of workers were covered by defined-benefit plans, down from 28 percent in 1979, according to the most recent figures collected by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group.

Last week, workers at Boeing became the latest group to say good-bye to these kinds of pensions. The workers’ furor over losing a traditional pension, a promise that had existed at the giant aircraft manufacturer since 1955, was a feature of the drama that played out for weeks and spread across the United States as Boeing dangled the possibility of moving high-paying factory jobs to a more business-friendly, less costly place, and drew bids from 22 states.

It was a reminder of the painful decisions unions face as they struggle to hold their ground and their jobs. Forced to choose between long-held contract gains and survival, many unions have backtracked, granting concessions and avoiding confrontations that they fear could backfire.

And it was a stunning display of a company’s determination to drive down labor costs amid incredible prosperity. Boeing was willing to dump its legacy in Washington state and its investment in its workers in order to find the best deal anywhere. Nowadays, such self-minded callousness is more and more common.

The battle over pensions began last year when Boeing approached the workers’ union at its factory in Washington, a 30,000-member local of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), and offered the chance to build its 777X jetliner, a state-of-the-art aircraft with carbon-fiber wings, if the union would negotiate a new contract.

But the company’s contract offer rattled the union’s members and cut deep divisions within its ranks. In November, the union rejected the company offer by a reported 2-to-1 margin. But the head of the union in Washington, D.C., overruled the objections of local Machinists to order a revote. Last week, the offer passed by a slim margin, 51-to-49 percent.

The contract gives the workers at least some of what they wanted. That is, it promises to continue to build the new planes in the state of Washington. And it includes a $10,000 signing bonus for workers, along with an added $5,000 bonus to be handed out in January 2020, which the company threw in at the last minute to sweeten the deal. The company also agreed to drop a proposal that would have taken new workers 16 years to reach full pay rather than the current six.

But the eight-year extension comes with concessions for workers. It offers only modest wage increases, parceled out over time with 1 percent pay hikes every other year and cost of living raises annually. An eight-year contract also creates a burden for the union, limiting its ability to deal with changes with the company. (Typically, unions dislike such long contracts, which limit their actions, while companies increasingly prefer them because they provide financial and workplace security.)

Perhaps most painfully, when the contract takes effect in 2016, workers’ current defined-benefit pensions will be frozen, and they will switch over to a defined-contribution plan supported by the company. All new employees will receive defined-contribution pensions starting in 2016.

Rick Sloan, a spokesperson for the union’s International leadership, believes that these pension cuts were the sticking point for the workers when they initially rejected the contract. “Pensions was probably the issue for the ‘no’ vote,” he says.

But to the IAM leadership, there was a bigger, longer-term issue, Sloan says: jobs. If the Machinists didn’t concede to the contract and Boeing carried through with its threat to move the 777X production out of Washington, the IAM stood to lose thousands of jobs. That would be a major blow to a manufacturing union that has seen its ranks dwindle as U.S. factories have shed jobs precipitously over the past 40 years. In 2010, non-supervisory factory employment in the United States had sunk to 8.4 million, the lowest since 1939. The Machinists union has suffered accordingly steep losses, going from nearly 1 million members in the late 1970s to about 420,000 active members, according to Sloan.

That’s what worried IAM President R. Thomas Buffenbarger, who ordered the new vote after the local union officials refused to hold one, Sloan explains. But the heads of IAM District Lodge 751 were willing to face that risk, strongly urging their members in a letter to reject the proposal.

“We are faced then with a choice to destroy everything that we have built over 78 years in order to save Boeing from making a decision that puts the future of the company, all of its employees (union and non-union alike) and the stockholders at risk,” they wrote.

Usually when U.S. companies have pressed for concessions, they have blamed their efforts on hard times. But Boeing relied on another explanation that has become popular: that it needs to keep costs down as it competes globally against fierce challengers. Caterpillar made a similar argument in the ‘90s when it took on the United Auto Workers union and handily won the battle, allowing it to hire new workers at lower wages and disconnecting its contract from the pattern that the UAW traditionally set with the major U.S. automakers.

In fact, Boeing has been doing exceptionally well lately, in financial terms: Its stock soared last year, and its chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., reportedly received more than 27 million dollars in total compensation in 2012, including a $4.4 million bonus for the company’s good performance.

The company’s very good health caught the attention of the union’s local leaders, who grumbled about them in their letter to members urging a “no” vote on the contract. Jake Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, agrees that there is a “disconnect” between the health of Boeing and the health of its workers. He views the disparity between Boeing’s prosperity and its wage-trimming and pension-cutting as a mark of a larger issue: the nation’s growing inequality.

While others might downplay the financial distress of Boeing Machinists, many of whom reportedly earn about $70,000 a year before overtime pay, Rosenfeld disagrees. “These are the prototypical middle-class workers,” explained Rosenfeld, who is the author of an upcoming book, What Unions No Longer Do. Protecting these workers’ access to middle-class jobs and pensions, he suggested, is just as important to combating inequality as boosting the pay of low-wage workers.

By contrast, Jack VanDerhei, research director for the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), which considers itself as a nonpartisan group, views Boeing’s shift to defined-contribution pensions as part of a steady trend by businesses. For today’s workers, he says, the concept of a pension guaranteed after years on the job with one employer may no longer apply. Nowadays workers go from job to job, moving on after a few years. Likewise, companies have been increasingly loath to support such pensions because of accounting requirements, he said. (Under government rules, companies must set aside money for the pension funds, insure them and then keep them at the needed levels amid stock market and interest rate changes.)

Nor is he convinced that the worker-driven pension plans are as flawed as some claim. Workers who regularly contribute to their pensions and do not face disastrous stock market upheavals, can “wind up with the same or more” come retirement, he said.

But Leon Grunberg, a professor at the University of Puget Sound and the author of the 2010 book, Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers, sees Boeing’s move as just the opposite of good business strategy.

Most business theory says that “you need a happy, well-committed workplace to have high profits,” explained Grunberg, whose book charts the lives of a large number of Boeing workers over the years.

And his study of the Boeing workers showed that “clearly the Boeing workforce is very unhappy,” he said. “But the shareholders, executives and stock analysts think things are doing well.”

For many Boeing workers and their supporters, however, the new Boeing contract boils down to something more simple: that uncertain futures have become a fact of life for U.S. workers.

Source: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16084/boeing_pension_retirement_middle_class/